The Pittsburgh Post- Gazette touched on a number of Mr. Wintrich’s social media and journalism feuds and controversies. These included attacks from half baked conservative websitesite Heat Street:

Correspondents for the conservative news site Heat Street are attacking him — along with his friends and many standards of propriety — by making gay jokes and mocking him for having changed his name.

“He changed it to Hitler,” one jests, “because Hitler is actually misunderstood.”

“This is insane, right?” asked Mr. Wintrich, who is gay and of Jewish ancestry.

It was another salvo in a feud that, among the not-so-libelous claims, featured Heat Street calling Mr. Wintrich “the dumbest man on the internet.” Mr. Wintrich, meanwhile, previously accused its correspondents of having “Cheetos-stained lips;” he’d later post off-color outtakes from the podcast online.

Weeks later, Heat Street was forced to close its doors do to lack of funding, a matter to which Lucian had little sympathy for after being mocked on their podcast:

To add to the social media controversies, the PPG also referenced a tweet that before Lucian deleted, had the chance to draw media attention from Newsweek:

In early July, for example, he tweeted a Photoshopped image of the Sept. 11 attacks, rendering Mr. Trump as the airplane and CNN’s credibility as the World Trade Center.

Mr. Wintrich quickly deleted that tweet, but makes few apologies for it. “A younger internet audience tends to be a bit nihilistic about sacred cows,” he said.

Though, they complimented this as an example of the frequent media coverage Lucian receives regarding his controversial post and actions. The Pittsburgh PG took note on the media’s fascination with Lucian Wintrich, quoting the Gateway Pundit’s founder Jim Hoft: “The media can’t leave him alone,… He’s like this shiny golden object they’re all fascinated with.” Mr. Wintrich’s ability to trigger the media is one of his undeniable strong suits.

The Gateway Pundit was referred to as a “particularly colorful publication” as it certainly is, one which “often amplifies social-media rumors and brings them to the attention of a wider audience.”

The PPG reviewed Lucians work as a White House correspondent, referring to Angelo Carusone of media matter’s “nothing burger” criticism of his job thus far:

Angelo Carusone, president of liberal media-criticism outlet Media Matters for America, said Mr. Wintrich “is not really doing what a White House correspondent does, but he wasn’t supposed to. They’re looking for that moment when they get a viral response.”

They got to summarizing Lucian’s early life, showing how he got started in media as well as the roots of his creative qualities:

The son of an artist and a design-firm owner Mr. Wintrich grew up in Squirrel Hill, though in media profiles he sometimes identifies himself as hailing from “the inner city of Pittsburgh.” (“Some friends in Pittsburgh called me out on that,” he said.)

“His creativity was pretty boundless,” recalled his mother, Rebecca Einhorn. Lucian began making art at age 2, and launched a crowdsourced student news site in 5th grade. In high school he co-hosted a podcast called “Acorns and Merlot,” which a 2007 Post-Gazette story described as “sometimes irreverent or crude [but] often hilarious.”

Mr. Wintrich later interned with Charlie Humphrey, then the head of Pittsburgh Filmmakers. The two produced a short film celebrating Pittsburgh’s 250th anniversary: In it, Mr. Wintrich sings and dances comedically, often with children he recruited on location in Oakland and Downtown.

“That playful quality is very much how he is,” said Mr. Humphrey. “He’s a bit of a prankster.”

Mr. Wintrich did graduate, composing a senior project that helped foreshadow his career: “Electronic Democracy and Electronic Propaganda: The New Media as a Political Tool.” But he bridled against a campus where he felt political correctness short-circuited debate.

“I think that regressive, leftist way of thinking is bad for the arts and bad for culture,” he said. He responded in part by launching an online journal that exercised no editorial control on submissions.

The PPG showed how Lucian’s “Twinks for Trump” photo shoot changed his life forever, getting him fired from his position at a New York advertising company and launching his career into political journalism.

This wasn’t the first time Lucian Wintrich appeared in the Pittsburgh Post- Gazette.

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